brainwagon

Just some pictures of the wrench after it came out of the bath. I just scrubbed the loose black oxides off with a Scotch Bright pad, and then coated it with some Boeshield T-9 protectant spray to keep it from re-rusting. I don’t think I’m going to do more with this.

Last weekend, I got this rather dirty and rusty wrench at a garage sale in my neighborhood. It’s an odd wrench, stamped with So. Pac. Co., which rather raises the likelihood that it was a wrench used on steam locomotives, and my guess would be that it’s probably closer to a century old than newer […]

Okay, that turned out to be easier than I suspected. I haven’t gotten around to derusting the mystery wrench, but I did do a little bit of simple cleaning, and when I did that, I discovered a couple of markings that were quite helpful. As in, it gave the entire game away. The manufacturer is […]

I took Friday off to make it a four day weekend. Part of the reason was so that I could prep some wood for my woodworking class. I got twenty Douglas Fir 2x4s from Lowes, and cut them to 64″ in length. My idea for my woodworking class was to use their jointer to trim […]

So, part of my incentive on working on my WSPR beacon was one of my coworkers decided to try to do some operating from the local Emeryville Marina, and I thought it might be nice to use the opportunity to try to pack up my WSPR setup and see if I could get some spots […]

As part of my attempt to get into woodworking and develop some actual skills, I have been keeping an eye out for what would best be described as “junky piles of rust” at garage and estate sales. I have been updating my twitter feed with pictures and short comments, but I thought it might be […]

I’ve been mostly working in my workshop on various projects related to woodworking, but last week one of my coworkers reminded me that Field Day, the yearly day where radio amateurs take their equipment into parks away from the comfort and ready electrical supply and operate under conditions which are meant to simulate (at least […]

Yesterday I wrote up my (successful and positive) results at using the commercial product Evaporust to remove rust from some of my smaller rusty auger bits that I got in a garage sale. Last night I got home late after a trivia competition, but decided to toss together a test for using electrolysis using bits […]

It is Monday morning, and I’m enjoying my coffee before heading off to work. All in all it was a pretty productive three day weekend, and I thought I write up a quick note about what I got accomplished. First of all, I got some woodworking in the shop done. I finished constructing the mover […]

This week, I picked up an ancient, decrepit box of rusty auger bits at an estate sale. The label inside refers to 1884 and 1887 patents by the Irwin Auger Company of Wilmington, Ohio, and it appears to be a fairly complete set, albeit in a wooden box which is pretty close to losing all […]

When cleaning the garage a while back, we discovered our old pink “Fight Breast Cancer” edition Roomba. For some reason, we had put it away and hadn’t been using it for years. The battery pack was dead, but a quick order on Amazon had returned it to working order. It happily scurries around the living […]

Okay, it’s not really a “shop”. It’s really just my garage. But then again, it’s hardly ever had a car in it in the last two decades, so calling it a garage is perhaps even a bit more of a stretch. But I’m trying to convert it into a place where I don’t mind spending […]

So, last night I didn’t actually get any woodworking done. Carmen actually did more than I did: she took the orbital sander to some (very rough) and cheap fence material that I’m going to use for the slats on the shelving and cleaned them up. They looked much nicer after this process. At just about […]

I got home from work today, and decided that the best way to lower my stress level was to go into the garage and make something. I didn’t really have a project in mind. I’ve been pondering making a drill press table and have been thinking about a couple of design options, some of which […]

Got home from work after seven last night, so didn’t have a ton of time in the workshop. I was also impatient to actually get the parts for my tool caddy actually glued up, so I worked rather more quickly than I should have. I taped the edges, spread some glue, rolled up the sides […]